Matchstick Masterpieces
LS Lowry collected clocks. His house, like his epic industrial landscapes, was packed with inert, blank faces. Each deliberately set to a different time. Perhaps the continuous chimes served as a prosaic reminder of the enforced ‘clocking on and off’ of his famous subjects. Maybe he didn’t want to risk being deafened by them all going off at once. Or maybe he was just a bit potty. Nobody really knows. Lowry’s personal life, like his paintings, was full of contradictions.
Some critics dismiss him as a leaden, one-dimensional commentator who lacked the hinterland to be a great artist. That he drew the outlines of his images (which he did) and filled them in afterwards. But this is nothing new in art. In his lifetime, Lowry produced more than 1,000 pictures and 800 drawings – making them in real time would not have been possible. He was narrating a period in time and his paintings remain some of the most easily identifiable images ever produced.
From left: Picadilly Circus (1960), Industrial Landscape (1955)
It is often assumed that Lowry was a ‘naive’ amateur painter, who, like his contemporary, the Cornish fisherman Alfred Wallis, was driven to capture the world around him because he knew no other life. But Lowry’s decision to immortalise the bleak factories and workers around his home was a very conscious one.
He wasn’t born with a cloth cap in his hand. His father was a clerk and his mother was a concert pianist who spent most of her life as an invalid – he would paint at night, between 10pm and 2am, after she had finally managed to sleep. It was dwindling finances that forced them from the leafy suburbs of Rusholme to the terraces of smog-filled Pendlebury. But by the time they moved, Lowry was 21 years old and had already benefitted from private art lessons and studied at the Manchester School of Art under the French impressionist Adolphe Valette.
The dramatic shift in his surroundings fascinated Lowry and, more importantly, inspired him. He knew that no one else had attempted to capture the literal heart of the industrial north with its chimney stacks and Methodist spires. Or the brick-lined alleyways swarming at shift-changing time with the antlike bodies of the colliery workers.
When the family arrived in 1909, the chronic poverty and ill health was palpable, and Lowry never shied away from exploiting it. Infant mortality was high, driven by the oxygen- starved air and the cramped living conditions that gave rise to rampant disease. His 1935 painting The Fever Van, is a harrowing yet compelling perspective, the eye drawn straight down a street as yet another little body is loaded into the back of the vehicle’s open doors, the church spire looming in the distance as a vague symbol of hope for the weeping mothers.
From left: Excavating in Manchester (1932), The Fever Van (1935)
Much is made of his ‘matchstick men’ style, their heads bowed and graphically rigid even in his celebratory panoramic canvas, VE Day (1945) – that he simply didn’t know how to paint nuanced figures. But again, it was deliberate. ‘Natural figures would have broken the spell of my vision,’ he once said. ‘So I had to make them half real.’ It is also possible that this emotional disconnect came as a result of his life spent working as a rent collector; that he needed them to be faceless in order to bang on doors for money he knew many of them didn’t have.
Despite his growing fame, he continued to work until his retirement at 65, the year before he was appointed Official Artist at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II . He has said it was a huge honour – although, contradictory to the last, he turned down five gongs, including a knighthood. Something of a record.
Lowry And The Painting Of Modern Life runs until 20 October at Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1: 020-7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk
Some critics dismiss him as a leaden, one-dimensional commentator who lacked the hinterland to be a great artist. That he drew the outlines of his images (which he did) and filled them in afterwards. But this is nothing new in art. In his lifetime, Lowry produced more than 1,000 pictures and 800 drawings – making them in real time would not have been possible. He was narrating a period in time and his paintings remain some of the most easily identifiable images ever produced.
From left: Picadilly Circus (1960), Industrial Landscape (1955) It is often assumed that Lowry was a ‘naive’ amateur painter, who, like his contemporary, the Cornish fisherman Alfred Wallis, was driven to capture the world around him because he knew no other life. But Lowry’s decision to immortalise the bleak factories and workers around his home was a very conscious one.
He wasn’t born with a cloth cap in his hand. His father was a clerk and his mother was a concert pianist who spent most of her life as an invalid – he would paint at night, between 10pm and 2am, after she had finally managed to sleep. It was dwindling finances that forced them from the leafy suburbs of Rusholme to the terraces of smog-filled Pendlebury. But by the time they moved, Lowry was 21 years old and had already benefitted from private art lessons and studied at the Manchester School of Art under the French impressionist Adolphe Valette.
The dramatic shift in his surroundings fascinated Lowry and, more importantly, inspired him. He knew that no one else had attempted to capture the literal heart of the industrial north with its chimney stacks and Methodist spires. Or the brick-lined alleyways swarming at shift-changing time with the antlike bodies of the colliery workers.
When the family arrived in 1909, the chronic poverty and ill health was palpable, and Lowry never shied away from exploiting it. Infant mortality was high, driven by the oxygen- starved air and the cramped living conditions that gave rise to rampant disease. His 1935 painting The Fever Van, is a harrowing yet compelling perspective, the eye drawn straight down a street as yet another little body is loaded into the back of the vehicle’s open doors, the church spire looming in the distance as a vague symbol of hope for the weeping mothers.
From left: Excavating in Manchester (1932), The Fever Van (1935) Much is made of his ‘matchstick men’ style, their heads bowed and graphically rigid even in his celebratory panoramic canvas, VE Day (1945) – that he simply didn’t know how to paint nuanced figures. But again, it was deliberate. ‘Natural figures would have broken the spell of my vision,’ he once said. ‘So I had to make them half real.’ It is also possible that this emotional disconnect came as a result of his life spent working as a rent collector; that he needed them to be faceless in order to bang on doors for money he knew many of them didn’t have.
Despite his growing fame, he continued to work until his retirement at 65, the year before he was appointed Official Artist at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II . He has said it was a huge honour – although, contradictory to the last, he turned down five gongs, including a knighthood. Something of a record.
Lowry And The Painting Of Modern Life runs until 20 October at Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1: 020-7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk